Haunted Houses of the Ancient World, Part 2

Uh, of course, the haunted house is a well-known setting for modern ghost stories, but it turns out there are descriptions of haunted houses going all the way back into antiquity.

Uh, so in the last episode, we focused on one of the big examples, one of the things that scholars talk about the most, uh, from the surviving literature, which is a letter from the first and second century Roman author Pliny the Younger.

Uh, in this letter, Pliny writes to a friend, a Roman senator named Sura, asking if Sura believes in ghosts, and he's like-- And you really-- I know you like to argue both sides of, of something, but you really gotta come down one side or the other 'cause I need to know.

Uh, he says, "I wanna know if you believe in ghosts." And then, uh, Pliny gives a trio of stories that he says, uh, that Pliny says compel him to accept that ghosts are real and have their own substance and divinity.

And one of the three stories he describes is the tale of a philosopher named Athenodorus, who rents a haunted house in Athens, confronts the ghost, and is able to solve the problem of the haunting by finding bones that are hidden under the courtyard, and then he makes sure that they get a proper public burial, and that-

Mm-hmm

... that allows the ghost to move on to, to, to the afterlife.

Um, so we talked about a lot of interesting features of this account, including the question of whether it provides any evidence of a, uh, broader haunted house genre of folk tale at the time of Pliny's writing, because you can't know for sure when you read the story whether it's just a unique account that Pliny has heard or whether it is a type of story that was-

Mm

... common in the Roman Empire.

Of course, we modern readers recognize that it is a type of story today, but the question is did that type of story, the haunted house format, evolve later, or was that something that existed at the time?

Yeah.

And, uh, and of course, it's worth noting again that there, there's still plenty of other ghost stories, but we're dealing very particularly with ghost stories that involve, like, a ghost localized to a home.

Yeah.

And, uh, its, its haunting is very much tied up in some sort of-- essentially in kind of, like, property issues to a certain extent.

Mm-hmm.

And we talked about that, uh, in the last episode.

Yeah.

And often has a-- there's a problem-solving element to the-

Mm-hmm

... haunted house story, unlike some other ghost stories wh- which just have a, a random scary thing happening.

Whereas in the haunted house story, it follows, like, the The, the f-, the structure we see with the Athenodorus tale, where there is a haunting, people are driven away from the home.

Eventually somebody must solve the problem.

They investigate.

They figure out how to fix the problem.

Uh, of course, the haunted house is a well-known setting for modern ghost stories, but it turns out there are descriptions of haunted houses going all the way back into antiquity.

Uh, so in the last episode, we focused on one of the big examples, one of the things that scholars talk about the most, uh, from the surviving literature, which is a letter from the first and second century Roman author Pliny the Younger.

Uh, in this letter, Pliny writes to a friend, a Roman senator named Sura, asking if Sura believes in ghosts, and he's like-- And you really-- I know you like to argue both sides of, of something, but you really gotta come down one side or the other 'cause I need to know.

Uh, he says, "I wanna know if you believe in ghosts." And then, uh, Pliny gives a trio of stories that he says, uh, that Pliny says compel him to accept that ghosts are real and have their own substance and divinity.

And one of the three stories he describes is the tale of a philosopher named Athenodorus, who rents a haunted house in Athens, confronts the ghost, and is able to solve the problem of the haunting by finding bones that are hidden under the courtyard, and then he makes sure that they get a proper public burial, and that-

Mm-hmm

... that allows the ghost to move on to, to, to the afterlife.

Um, so we talked about a lot of interesting features of this account, including the question of whether it provides any evidence of a, uh, broader haunted house genre of folk tale at the time of Pliny's writing, because you can't know for sure when you read the story whether it's just a unique account that Pliny has heard or whether it is a type of story that was-

Mm

... common in the Roman Empire.

Of course, we modern readers recognize that it is a type of story today, but the question is did that type of story, the haunted house format, evolve later, or was that something that existed at the time?

Yeah.

And, uh, and of course, it's worth noting again that there, there's still plenty of other ghost stories, but we're dealing very particularly with ghost stories that involve, like, a ghost localized to a home.

Yeah.

And, uh, its, its haunting is very much tied up in some sort of-- essentially in kind of, like, property issues to a certain extent.

Mm-hmm.

And we talked about that, uh, in the last episode.

Yeah.

And often has a-- there's a problem-solving element to the-

Mm-hmm

... haunted house story, unlike some other ghost stories wh- which just have a, a random scary thing happening.

Whereas in the haunted house story, it follows, like, the The, the f-, the structure we see with the Athenodorus tale, where there is a haunting, people are driven away from the home.

Eventually somebody must solve the problem.

They investigate.

They figure out how to fix the problem.